SAP Leonardo Live – announcement wishlist

We’re on the eve of SAP Leonardo Live hosted in Chicago and as I boarded my flight this morning, I found myself wondering what I am looking to get out of the conference.

In July, I attended SAP Leonardo Live in Frankfurt where we received a great overview of SAP’s vision for Leonardo and why it was a lot more than an IoT platform. So what do I want and what do others want from this two day event this week?

I reached out to some colleagues and customers (specific thanks to DJ Adams and Chris Kernaghan) and asked what they wanted to see this week. So here it goes:

Hammer home what SAP Leonardo actually is

It has been 6 months since the release of SAP Leonardo at SAPPHIRE and ASUG 2017 and there are customers (a lot of them) still confused about what it is. Is it a product, a service, a process or does Leonardo mean IoT? SAP are starting to do a good job clearing that up but let’s hammer that message home at Leonardo Live!

A clear “how to get started” call to action for customers

SAP have done a great job socializing the “SAP Leonardo” brand. Now it’s time to make it real for customers. Publish the clear steps to get started. What do they need to do specifically to get SAP working with them or how to get their preferred partner and SAP working and co-innovating with them.

Industry Accelerator roadmap and timeline

At launch SAP released a small number of “Industry Accelerators”. These are 80% complete use case solutions which are lightly customizable and deployable in a very short period. I’m looking forward to hearing that the list of IAs available today is dramatically increasing in length. It’s also important to have demos of these apps publicly available to get customers and partners invested. Between partners creating their own IAs and SAP themselves – it would give confidence to customers that this is a real area worth investing in if they can see that list growing fast.

Remove the platform barriers

Once your prototype is ready in SAP BUILD, make it easy to publish that app to a SCP sandpit environment. The technology pillars of Leonardo should be pre-configured and ready to go. Or put another way, provide customers with the ability to provision required tools based upon Build prototype directly from a generated Build Manifest using SCP. Removing this kind of logistical barrier is always going to help with adoption of both SCP and Leonardo.

Real world & relatable use cases beyond just IoT

Leonardo as an SAP brand started its life as an IoT solution. Now that it is so much more, let’s move onto focusing on the other technology pillars of Leonardo. If we can hear more about real-world deployments using pillars like ML, AI and Blockchain that would be really good.